Page:Letters from England.djvu/121

 cloudily smoking glens between the bald ridges of mountain-tops, and again a lake with dark reeds, its surface without birds, a region without people, disquiet without cause, a road without a goal, I do not know what I am seeking, but this anyhow is solitude; drink your fill of this unbounded sadness, before you return to the haunts of men, batten on solitude, unappeased soul; for you have seen nothing greater than this desolation.

And now I am driven along into the valley; by the roadside yellow sparks of gorse gush forth, dwarf pines crouch, stunted birch-trees have clutched at granite rubble; a black torrent leaps through the valley, here are now the pine-woods, the purple bloom of rhododendra and crimson digitalis; birch-trees, sumach, oaks and alders, Nordic wildness, ferns waist-high, and a dense forest of junipers; the sun pierces the clouds, and below glistens the deep strip of a new sea among the mountain peaks.